Google announced back in 2010 it was seeking communities to participate in an experiment involving insanely fast fiber-optic broadband. The plan was called Google Fiber and ultimately Kansas City was chosen. The first homes and businesses with Google Fiber had their 1 Gbps service turned on yesterday.

However, anytime we see internet providers offer theoretical peak speeds, we usually take them with a huge grain of salt. However, it looks like Google Fiber is actually incredibly fast in the real world.

A Google Fiber user named Mike Demarais ran a speed test only minutes after his service went live according to ArsTechnica. He achieved 696.38 Mbps download and an impressive 620.49 Mbps upload.

"The first thing I did was BitTorrent Ubuntu," Demarais said. "I think that took two minutes, let me try it again right now."

The home where Demarais accesses these incredibly fast internet speeds is operated by Homes for Hackers, and is owned by Ben Barreth. Entrepreneurs can live in the house rent and utility free for three months at a time, only needing to pay for their own groceries.

Homes for Hackers is billed as an attempt to kick start high-tech businesses within the city.

Google offers a few different plans for customers. For $120/month you get Gigabit internet (up/down), HDTV service, a Nexus 7 tablet, and 1 TV box. If all you need is gigabit internet, that will only run you $70/month. Google is even offering a "free" internet service (guaranteed for at least 7 years) that provides 5Mb down/1Mb up. However, customers have to pay the $300 "construction fee" that is waived on the two paid packages.

There are no data caps on any of Google's packages (including the "free" one).

BT has a ramp up time (as it connects and starts downloading from seeders) and depending on how many seeders you can get and what they set their upload speed it you might not max out a connection that fast.

Depends if you are grabbing 12.04 LTS or 12.10. 12.10 is 763 MB. The Kubuntu 12.10 images are a little bit bigger, but the main thing I am pointing out is *buntu is moving away from CD image to DVD images. Trivial but just throwing that out there.

Not sure how this is an appropriate response to a commenter who expresses doubt in the notion that there is a 1:1 correspondence between one's maximum quoted bandwidth and a given host's upload bandwidth.

Achieving the max can be achieved thru multiple smaller streams, but may be difficult to find a single provider of reliable (not burst) ~.7 Gb/s upload rate. Based on my experiences using "uber" connections, many (most?) servers throttle their maximum per client bandwidth allotment, as the max was never attainable at a single place. Highest speeds were usually well-ramped-up BT downloads.

I wonder where the speed test went to. I imagine the bottleneck is going to be the speed of other people's connections and the routers between you and them.

Unless you're downloading from someone else in Kansas City, who is also on Google Fiber, you're probably not going to hit anywhere near the advertised speeds. But you'd think a torrent with a bunch of seeds would have been faster than the speed he reported. If it took 2 minutes to download 650MB that's only 5.41MB/s or 43.3Mbit/s average. That's still way faster than my ISP, but way under what I'd expect for a popular torrent. Maybe Ubuntu isn't as popular as I would think, or maybe everyone seeding has a low cap on their upload speed.

I'd like to see some more test results. Of course I'd rather have Google's fiber so I could run tests myself. :)

When you're talking about megabytes per second (MB/s) you can see that the sequential transfer rate of your device becomes more important.

If you are not using a decent SSD, i.e. one that has a high sustained sequential write speed (a lot of cheaper ones don't) then you are not going to be able to utilize that bandwidth effectively. A lot of people are using laptops and smartphones these days rather than desktop PCs so this is mainly going to affect them.

For people running a laptop with a standard mechanical drive you are probably not going to see much more than 200 Mbps regardless of what the bandwidth is because your computer cannot actually accept data at a faster rate than its storage media.

You will be able to get short bursts at full speed thanks to memory buffers, which means there is some benefit when it comes to streaming media which can exist entirely in the buffer, but beyond that you'd need a system.

Would be great to see this kind of connectivity deployed nationally...I think Verizon has a head start since FiOS is a dedicated fiber line for each customer...and their infrastructure could support these types of speeds.

Was this ever disputed in my comment? In fact, that is why I posted Mbps with the MB/s equivalent beside them.

Yes, there are 2.5" mechanical drives that can hit 75 MB/s or better max transfer rates in synthetic benchmarks...but are these "standard" in most consumer laptops? That is an unverifiable blanket statement and it is also not the point.

The point is that there are a large amount of mobile devices out there which cannot sustain such high transfer rates and my comment simply brings that fact to attention. If your download speed exceeds the sequential data rate of your device's storage media, the media will become a bottleneck.

quote:Just to prove my point.

Notice. its 145MB/s for sequential performance. not 145mbps. Thats 1160 mbps. why did you guys think HDD speads were measured in bits??

What point? You arbitrarily claim that standard laptop hard drives can sustain sequential read/writes of 75 MB/s then link to a review of a 3.5" desktop hard drive rather than a 2.5" laptop drive.

Why did you think anyone here was discussing the units for measuring drive speed when we were actually talking about network transfer speed being bottle-necked by slow storage media?

"For people running a laptop with a standard mechanical drive you are probably not going to see much more than 200 Mbps regardless of what the bandwidth is because your computer cannot actually accept data at a faster rate than its storage media."

Synthetic benchmarks have NOTHING to do with it. Notebook harddrives can easily hit 40-60, even the slow ones. So that's 320-480. A decent notebook drive could go well beyond that.

quote: I'm saying that the storage isn't the bottle neck. How is that not obvious? I'm also saying that your argument of 200mbps is invalid, because 200mbps is 25MB/s. Almost any harddrive can hit that in a sequential write. This has NOTHING to do with synthetic and everything to do with whether its a random write or not. Downloads are sequential mostly.

And what you're saying is incorrect since you're presenting it as an absolute, while simultaneously demonstrating a general ignorance on this topic. You're original comment was false and your followup is even more erroneous. I've already indicated that downloads are primarily sequential transfers - not sure why you felt the need to repeat that.

Synthetic benchmarks, which you are basing your claims upon, do not necessarily mirror actual "real world" performance. A mechanical hard drive may be able to score big numbers in a benchmark simply because a large portion of the test occurs within the drive's onboard cache. You're seeing the effects of burst transfers elevating the average measured transfer speed of the drive due to the predictable, repetitive nature of the benchmark I/O.

"Many" laptops shipped with budget hard drives that peak around 40-50 MB/s in benchmarks for sequential writes. 30 MB/s as a real world average for 4200-5400 RPM laptop drives is not inaccurate.

The 2.5" Scorpio Black I have benches at over 100 MB/s for sequential writes but copying to or from that laptop over a gigabit network does not result in sustained speeds at 100 MB/s...in fact, aside from the benchmarks I do not see much more than 75 MB/s in any real world applications including something basic like file copying. This experience is consistent with all mechanical drives that I've owned.

quote: Synthetic benchmarks have NOTHING to do with it. Notebook harddrives can easily hit 40-60, even the slow ones. So that's 320-480. A decent notebook drive could go well beyond that.

No, not really. The slow drives are peaking around 35-40 MB/s on a good day. Google is offering 1 Gbps internet. That's 1,000 Mbps or 125 MB/s. A typical FAST notebook hard drive like the WD Scorpio Black can sustain around 75 MB/s which is a little more than half of that, and that drive was not standard fare on the typical $499 laptop that consumers tend to spring for.

I never said that everyone with a mobile device is going to have a problem - but I did say that with 1 Gbps network bandwidth, the throughput of your storage media can potentially become a bottleneck and that is entirely accurate.

"Why did you think anyone here was discussing the units for measuring drive speed when we were actually talking about network transfer speed being bottle-necked by slow storage media?"

I'm saying that the storage isn't the bottle neck. How is that not obvious? I'm also saying that your argument of 200mbps is invalid, because 200mbps is 25MB/s. Almost any harddrive can hit that in a sequential write. This has NOTHING to do with synthetic and everything to do with whether its a random write or not. Downloads are sequential mostly.